jon christensen

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Jon Christensen in City Lab: California’s Wildfires Are Not a Morality Tale

The fire-scorched state’s history has long been marked by calamities. But its latest disaster did not come to teach Californians a lesson.

“Every crisis is not an apocalypse, and every fire isn’t either,” said Jon Christensen, an environmental historian, writer, and professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “These are serious challenges, and progress is uneven. But to cry ‘apocalypse’ in the face of every crisis is not useful.”